Strong language warning: Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed

The guy had successfully hidden his identity for about five years, while posting all kinds of sexually charged abuse to the Internet, about many people, including me.

He will never be facing any "human rights" charges, but Wendy Sullivan, the Girl on the Right, has officially found out who the mysterious Canadian Cynic is. Here is stuff he has said about me.

He is Robert PJ Day. Small business owner. Computer genius. Well-read book nerd. Anti-creationist debater.

A Linux genius, apparently.

Here is part of what Sullivan said, once she traced him:

Outing bloggers isn’t usually my thing. I don’t see a point to it. But when you repeatedly abuse and demean people because they do not march in lockstep with you, I’m sorry but you deserve it. I am not a cunt, Robert. Nor a douchebag. Neither is Kathy Shaidle, Kate, Connie Fournier, Sandy Crux, Suzanne Fortin or anyone else on the web you don’t like.

I am not above strong language and hyperbole, Robert, but I am not beneath you. You are not special. I do not dispute that you are extremely smart and well-versed in your subjects of choice. But referring to to those you feel superior to as “cunts”, “wankers”, “douchebags”, “assholes” and more doesn’t make you sound brilliant at all. It makes you sound sad and lonely. It also makes you seem very cowardly, because I know you would never call me a cunt to my face. You would never wander into downtown Toronto and meet with half the people you have insulted - on a one-to-one or at a party - and insult them the way you do behind your chosen alias.

Perhaps not. The thing I know from covering the intelligent design controversy is that a number of people like Cynic give themselves the right to pour obscene contempt and abuse at the public. Obviously, those people are frightened of something.

What would your mother say, Robert, if she knew that you referred to a woman older than she probably is as a douchebag? ( I assume that your mother is still with us. If not, I apologize, one orphan to the next. ) Is that how she raised you?

He has decided to raise the abuse level last night for me, presumably in response to being outed. The Centre for Inquiry, a secular humanist group, is sponsoring it. Did those people really sit there and listen?

Can you be good without God? I'd never necessarily maintained that you couldn't, but now I am beginning to wonder ....

Apparently, Day proclaimed himself to be "coming out in public" that night. But only because bloggers outed him first.

Sullivan tells me recent posts have featured greatly toned down language. It figures.

Some people have morality. Others rely on avoiding exposure.

(Note: This point caused some confusion over at Uncommon Descent. Wendy Sullivan and I are free speech bloggers. We have never maintained that he did not have the right to say those things. But he was an avatar for five years, so no one even knew where it was coming from. That is a different issue, because it spared him the resulting embarrassment.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Salvo! Great new articles and summaries online

Issue 9 of Salvo (Summer 2009) has come out, with many fine articles. The feature article is on the explosion of kids watching Internet porn.*

A number of interesting features on topics related to the intelligent design controversy:

Gimme that Spacetime Religion: Seeking Salvation in Science by Regis Nicoll, about the effort to transform Darwinism into a religion with all the trappings - except actual guilt for sin.

Wesley J. Smith, describing himself as a "Human Exceptionalist" talks about the effect that the growing practice of equating humans with animals and plants has on bioethics, pointing out, "If they really wanted to be reductionist, they could also say that because carrots are made out of carbon molecules, there is no distinction between carrots and humans either. You can't get far enough ahead of these guys in terms of satire."

Twin Features: The Big Problem That Design Convergence Posses to Darwinian Evolution by Hugh Ross: Remember the Tree of Life we were taught in high school, that proved Darwin was right? "The problem for the Darwinian perspective is this: Life forms that are only distantly rrelated, if at all, nevertheless show amazing similarities in their morphological features (some are identical). This is not what Darwinists expect." He recounts a good deal of examples, including Lenski's famous simulation, showing that repeated design is a better explanation. We are now down to the club moss of life, I guess. Turns up everywhere.

The Flop: Betting Against Darwin's Tree of Life by Casey Luskin: A great companion to the above. Luskin explains how a famous Darwinist, self-cited as one of the "world's leading experts on the tree of life" tried to bluff the Texas State Board of Education that Darwin's Tree of Life was in great shape - when current science lit shows it is collapsing. Or, as Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said, "... today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence." One of the world's leading experts should spend less time bluff and more time reading the evidence. Even the Texas Board can find this stuff out now. (If they don't, it won't be Luskin's fault.)

Old Bones: The Story of a Girl with a Birth Defect by Michael Cook: About a severely retarded child who lived over 500 000 years ago. "Now here's the remarkable thing. The hunter-gatherer Middle Pleistocene family of Cranium 14 must have cared for the child, or she would not have survived for at least five years, and perhaps as many as twelve. In the dry-as-dust words of the article, 'It is obvious that the [Sima de Huesos]' hominin species did not act against the abnormal/ill individuals during infancy, as has happened along our own history in many cultures.'"

My regular Deprogram column is about Phineas Gage - the Lecture Room Psychopath. It seems he wasn't a psychopath in his lifetime, but became one after his death, when he was needed to demonstrate to Psychology 101 students that brain injury radically changes personality. "Sadly, Intro to Psych 101 professors didn't need a workingman who had independently adapted to his disability - without government funding - and found work on his own. They needed an aimless, sociopathic drifter."

Only the first of these ID-relevant articles seems to be online. If you thought this was a hint that you should subscribe or buy just this one issue, or support Salvo - well yes, it is!

Americans, Happy July 4!

(*As a mother and grandmother, I would say key controllable factors are more chores, more sports, more homework, and more supervision. A busy, supervised kid is not watching porn whether it is available or not, for the same reason that a busy, supervised kid isn't smoking (or not often) even if he can buy cigs from a complicit shopkeeper.)

Theistic evolution - why can't God and Darwin kiss and make up?

Recently, a friend asked me about this perennial topic:

I replied, In today's Christian culture, the materialist atheist model of the universe is assumed to be true, but Christianity can be fitted in as an add-on, a sort of optional part that most people wouldn't need, but some insist on, because it helps them feel good.

No one says Christians can't bark for Jesus somewhere, preferably in a tabernacle far from civilization.

What the ID guys did was provide concrete evidence why the materialist atheist view of the universe - that is accepted as the norm - is incorrect. That it does not remotely account for the evidence. That is why they were so bitterly attacked.

When Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution came out, the posts at one allegedly Christian science list were revealing, disgusting, and pretty lame. I wrote a review here, to help people understand Behe's actual point: Very little Darwinian evolution had been observed in precisely the places we might expect it.

Why were the "Christians" in science so hostile to him? Because he provided evidence that did not support a theory fronted by materialist atheists. The skinny: They own the idea of evidence. Evidence is what supports them. By definition. If it doesn't support them, it isn't evidence.

Francis Collins isn't seriously attacked because he offers no serious challenge. Who cares if he feels good believing in God?

Now, Mike Behe and I have in common that we are real theistic evolutionists, That is, we say that if God wanted to create entirely through evolution, he could do so. But the question of whether God in fact did so must be addressed separately, and it depends strictly on evidence, not on prior assumptions.

What the "theistic evolutionists" (= fellow travellers and useful idiots) that one meets so often in Christian circles (I am using stare quotes here intentionally) mean is something quite different: They want to fit God into a system whose fundamental basis is atheist materialism. They want to form a bubble for theists in a world where atheism is assumed to follow from the evidence.

Apart from the fact that it won't work, it is completely contrary to the Christian tradition - and to all ethical monotheism whatever. If the "theistic evolutionists" were serious about ethical monotheism, they would support ID, the way serious Muslims and Jews do. Because it's obvious.

Darwinism and popular culture: Catholics who get the picture

In "Co-Discoverer of Natural Selection Believed in "Overruling Intelligence" Guiding Evolution"(True Catholic, July 1, 2009), Hilary White comments, referring to Michael Flannery’s new book on Wallace,

Flannery said that his book is an effort to "recast" the current dispute between materialist Darwinians and Intelligent Design proponents by examining the history of evolutionary theory. He holds that the "science" versus "creationism" conflict are "popular caricatures" that are "unhistorical and inaccurate."

He points to Wallace, a naturalist, anthropologist and biologist, who had independently developed a theory of natural selection when Darwin published his book. The two parted company in a dispute over the role of natural selection in the development of human intelligence. After years of research into this question, Wallace came to the conclusion that the processes of natural selection were guided by a higher intelligence, whereas Darwin held to the concept of "randomness" in evolution. The difference, Flannery says, is one of metaphysics, which, for Darwin, was already a settled question.

Writing in Forbes magazine, Flannery explained, "Darwin's own theory could hardly be called objectively scientific. Early influences on Darwin's youth established his predisposition to materialism and a dogmatic methodological naturalism long before his voyage on the Beagle."

It is nice to see Catholics address this head on. Too often, Catholic profs and high school teachers have been among the worst offenders in misrepresenting the purpose of Darwin's theory. (You know, the "no conflict between faith and science" crowd. ) Darwin's theory is not compatible with traditional metaphysics and was never intended to be. As Flannery points out, Darwin said as much in his notebooks, long before he published The Origin of Species or had any theory about it. Much recommended book.

More podcasts from the evil Discovery Institute, with some comments

Now that their Steve Meyer has published Signature in the Cell with Harper One, they are getting more evil all the time.

1. The Making of an ID Theorist: Stephen C. Meyer and the Origin of Life

Click here to listen.

This episode of ID the Future tells the story of how philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer first began his quest for the origin of life. How did one of the architects of the intelligent design movement move from the oilfields of Texas to the study halls of Cambridge to pursue the mystery of where biological information originated? Listen in and find out.

The new book, Signature in the Cell, tells the rest of the story, the culmination of over 20 years of study and research on the origins of life.

[I will be giving out five copies as part of the Uncommon Descent Contest. Details later. (They haven't arrived yet.)]

2. Misunderstanding God and Evolution: John West Responds to First Things’ Stephen Barr
Theistic evolutionists often try to say that ID proponents present a “false dilemma,” that it’s somehow wrong to think that random processes cannot be directed by God. This is the take that Stephen Barr at First Things has on John West’s recent Washington Post essay.

In response, Dr. West posted a three-part series at ENV dealing with serious questions for those dealing with the implications of Darwin’s theory and intelligent design:

"Barr first claims that Joe Carter and I “are trapped in a false dilemma” because we wrongly think that random processes cannot be directed by God. Barr points out that even random events, properly defined, are part of God’s sovereign plan. Just because something is random from our point of view, doesn’t mean that it is outside of God’s providence. Barr may be surprised to learn that I agree with him. Indeed, most, if not all, of the scholars who believe that nature provides evidence of intelligent design would agree with him. The problem with Barr’s argument is not with his understanding of the proper meaning of random, but with his seeming blindness to the fact that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists do not share his view. Barr’s ultimate disagreement here is not with me or Joe Carter, but with the discipline of evolutionary biology itself."

Finish reading Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here
Read Part 3 here

[Yes, exactly. Of course God can direct processes that appear to be random to us. But life forms do not in fact look random, and we are under no obligation to believe they are, unless we are fronting a materialist theory. And while we are here, the enormous hostility of the Darwinists should tell Dr. Barr something. It is a message he is not picking up.]

3. The Design Argument Is Unrefuted: Stephen Meyer Responds to Critics With Signature in the Cell, Part 4

Click here to listen.

On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer responds to critics of intelligent design, such as Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion.

How do critics of ID miss the point, and what are the questions they should be asking about intelligent design? Listen in to find out, and check out Dr. Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell, where Dr. Meyer goes into more detail.

Click here for Part 1 of this series.Click here for Part 2 of this series.Click here for Part 3 of this series.

[It's unrefuted partly because critics have concentrated on attacking the characters and careers of design theorists, hoping that'll be enough. It's not. Some time they will need to address the evidence.]

4. Matter and the Mind: Part Three With UK Darwin-Doubter James LeFanu

Click here to listen.

This episode of ID the Future features the third and final part of Casey Luskin's interview with James LeFanu, author of Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, which discusses the problems for the materialist account of the human mind. How do we get from the electrochemical activity of the brain to the richness of the human mind? Listen in as Dr. LeFanu summarizes the five things that material science can’t tell us about the non-material mind.
Listen to part one of the interview here. Listen to part two of the interview here.

To learn more about Dr. LeFanu, visit his website here or read a recent review of his book at Evolution News & Views.

[I must get and read his book, after I work my way through Signature of the Cell. Fundamentally, there is no "material" mind. Our minds are precisely what is not material about our thught processes; our brains are what is. If you mentally add up a sum, the resulting number is not a material object. It is an idea in your mind. ]

5. DNA Evidence for Design: Stephen C. Meyer and Signature in the Cell, Part 3

Click here to listen.

On this episode of ID the Future CSC Director Stephen C. Meyer explains the problem that information presents to origin of life researchers within a naturalistic paradigm. Information within the cell presents a daunting challenge to Darwin’s theory -- and provides significant evidence for a signature of a designing intelligence, as Meyer explains in his new book.
Listen in and check out Dr. Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell, which shares the depth of Dr. Meyer's research into the origin of information and the digital code in DNA.

Click here for Part 1 of this series.Click here for Part 2 of this series.

[Darwin had no idea of any of this, and would probably have tried out a different theory, had he known. That's what makes so many of his defenders sound so ridiculous. Thomas Huxley warned that this would happen. Darwinism would degenerate into a superstition - a tax-funded one at present.]

6. Delving Into Science at Cambridge: Stephen C. Meyer and Signature in the Cell, Part 2

Click here to listen.

On this episode of ID the Future philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer continues the story of how he became involved in intelligent design, sharing some of what he studied while at Cambridge University. What methods do scientists use to study biological origins? Is there a distinctive method of historical scientific inquiry? Meyer set off to investigate not only the history of scientific ideas about the origin of life, but also questions about the definition of science and about how scientists study and reason about ancient events in the past. Listen in to learn, and check out Dr. Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell, which tells more of the story, the culmination of over 20 years of study and research on the origins of life.

Click here for Part 1 of this series.

[I get the feeling that Cambridge is more friendly to design than Oxford, and will research the question.]

Intelligent design and popular culture: Plagiarism

A friend points me to this ad, noting "If an ID-proponent won one of these, that would be embarrassing."

"Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation."

In my experience, the surest guide to plagiarism is the lack of any original ideas. The sense of "been there, done that, got the tee. So why are we back here now? Did we discover that we had left a passenger behind when I was asleep?"

A person who has original ideas - , good, bad, or merely confused or misinformed - disdains plagiarism on principle.

Dinosaurs survived into the Paleocene (comparatively modern) era - about 65 million years ago and counting?

Well, EurekaAlert (28 April 2009) offers some suggestions in "Evidence of the 'Lost World' -- did dinosaurs survive the end Cretaceous extinctions?"

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago. Various Hollywood versions have tried to recreate the lost world of dinosaurs, but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality. New scientific evidence suggests that dinosaur bones from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin, USA, date from after the extinction, and that dinosaurs may have survived in a remote area of what is now New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years. This controversial new research, published today in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, is based on detailed chemical investigations of the dinosaur bones, and evidence for the age of the rocks in which they are found.

"The great difficulty with this hypothesis - that these are the remains of dinosaurs that survived - is ruling out the possibility that the bones date from before the extinction" says Jim Fassett, author of the research. "After being killed and deposited in sands and muds, it is possible for bones to be exhumed by rivers and then incorporated into younger rocks" he explains.

My caution is, we all want this. We wish the more interesting dinos were alive today. Gee, if we could show off a real T Rex at the Royal Ontario Museum, people would be lined up around the block 18 times. But, like the space aliens, ... they never write, they never phone ...

Goodbye, frog prince. It was your habit of eating flies in public that totally bugged me

No, but seriously, Robert Deyes asks at Access Research Network, "Are We Kissing The Frog Prince Goodbye?"

Review Of PBS NATURE Documentary Thin Green Line: For those who take issue with the rather blase application of evolution to every aspect of biology, Public Television's recent showing of Thin Green Line is bound to have raised hackles. Few nature documentaries that I have seen begin with quite the same density of evolutionary suppositions. We are told for example that amphibians were the first of our ancestors to venture out of the water and that they have since evolved 'into an explosion of species'. By the same token frogs are made out to be evolutionary gems that over the millennia adapted to live alongside dinosaurs, survive asteroid impacts and withstand the rigors of the ice age. Yet herein lies the irony. For despite all their supposed evolving and adapting, amphibians today have been unable to keep up with the more recent pace of environmental change.

Indeed evolutionary just-so stories aside, Thin Green Line provided important yet deeply troubling details about a tragedy that is unfolding beneath our very eyes- one that is unprecedented in its sheer scale. A third of all amphibian species across the globe are currently in decline and half of all amphibian species may eventually disappear altogether. Like many environmental tragedies, human activity is partly to blame. Spade-Foot toads in Cape Cod for example are being edged out by an increase in road construction while the Mountain Yellow-Legged frogs of America's Yosemite National Park have only recently recovered from a hard-fought battle against fish that were introduced by recreational fishers in the early 1900's (Ref 1).

As the demand for new housing continues to rise across the world, amphibians are facing survival challenges on every front.

The trouble with amphibians is that they are stupid. In response to every new challenge, they need help surviving, because they won't do it themselves. Do you doubt this? Compare them to rats, raccoons, and Canada geese.

The only solution, in my view, is to get communities to adopt species and create an interest in keeping them alive. You can be sure they won't do it themselves.

Other extinction stories.

Identical animals may be completely different species?

From ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2009) —

Animals that seem identical may belong to completely different species. This is the conclusion of researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who have used DNA analyses to discover that one of our most common segmented worms is actually two types of worm.

The result is one of many suggesting that the variety of species on Earth could be considerably larger than we thought.

"We could be talking about a large number of species that have existed undiscovered because they resemble other known species," says Professor Christer Erséus.

It also helps explain why, after centuries of indoctrination, so few people put much trust in conventional evolution theories.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: In case you wondered what was happening, on Canada Day

From Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee:

Here is a bit of the roundup of news stories about free expression and the law in Canada. Ponder them on Canada Day.

SALMAN HOSSAIN

A Toronto man who posted messages on the Internet supporting terrorist attacks in Canada and the deportation of Jews will not face criminal charges, police said.

Stewart Bell of the National Post :

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1745155


In a lengthy article, Joseph Brean of the National Post explores the application of anti-hate-speech provisions in the Criminal Code:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1745188

[This incident beautifully demonstrates what is wrong with the "human rights" and "hate crimes" system. Were Canada a society under threat, some of this might be understandable, even expected, though we would critique specific decisions. But that's not the case. "Human rights" and "hate crimes" bodies act opportunistically, usually against Christians, "white" men, business owners, et cetera, and anyone else who has been portrayed as bad in pop culture media.

Because they do not operate according to the traditional rules of law.

Therefore others can get away with hatred and threats.

So the target is not protected! The only thing the agencies are now certainly protecting is themselves. Goodness knows, they have reason to believe their butts are vulnerable, but the solution is just to get rid of them. ]

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Is the future of journalism ... a hobby?

My friend Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury sends me this interesting post by Seth Godin on what the Internet means to the future of publishing:

Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn't have worked in 1784, and they're not going to work very soon in the future either.

We're always going to need writers, but the business model of their platform is going to change.

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We'll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.

People will not pay for by-the-book rewrites of news that belongs to all of us. People will not pay for yesterday's news, driven to our house, delivered a day late, static, without connection or comments or relevance. Why should we? A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it?

Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple:

In a world of free, everyone can play

Interesting. There was a time when books were the preserve of scholars. Printing technology changed all that. It also created a professional class of people who sorted news for others. Indeed, social class was often reflected in which paper one's household subscribed to. See this snatch of dialogue from Rumpole of the Bailey:

It seems he's just remarried and his new wife takes in the Daily Beacon.

How odd?

What's odd?

A judge's wife reading the Beacon.

Hugh Fishwick married his cook, Ballard told him in solemn tones.

Really? I didn't know. Well, that explains it.

And journalists?

There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

So to journalists everywhere, I say, don't feel bad; it's not you. It's not mistakes you made. It's not bad guys.

Our industry grew up in an era when people needed pros to sort news. That was so you didn't have to wade through the senseless crime-of-the-day from the Beacon when you really needed the bond market news from the Financial Gazette. Today, people can sort their own news. If I never, ever want to hear from the Beacon, I can easily arrange matters so that I never do.

That is the fundamental reason that journalists are less necessary than before. And it will develop in that direction.

Majority support intelligent design? Some thoughts

From Discovery Institute:

Doubts about Darwin Continue to Mount

Seattle – Just a few months before the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.”

[The majority of the human race has always believed that. Given the predominance of materialst atheism at universities, if they haven't convinced a majority of the public, their cause is a failure.]

“In the Year of Darwin, these figures must represent a terrible disappointment to Darwinian advocates,” commented Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D., director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, which commissioned the poll. “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was supposed to be the refutation of intelligent design, yet more than a century later the public has grown increasingly disenchanted with Darwin’s claims.”

[Maybe. In my view, far from considering it a terrible disappointment, the Darwinists - assuming they noticed - will do is run to the government for more, more, more funding to front their views, and ramp up the persecution of any who doubt. Maybe they can get Obama to make a statement.]

Dr. Meyer is the author of a new book from HarperOne, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. He suggested the polling data may reflect a growing awareness of recent scientific developments, documented in his book. As word seeps out from the scientific community, confidence in Darwinism has begun to perceptibly erode:

[Darwin's mechanism - natural selection acting on random mutation produces intricate machinery - was never demonstrated. Most "proofs" are paltry indeed, when you look at the evidence. Belief in Darwin's mechanism was enforced.]

“It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code. Having advanced to this level of digital technology ourselves, in computer science, we can at last begin to appreciate what is going on inside the cell: the nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval and storage systems, the whole operating system in the genome. The cell is doing the same thing a computer’s operating system does, but with far, far greater efficiency.” More here.

[Think of it: You shed millions of cells every day, and every one of them is a more remarkable work of art than your computer. And biodegradeable too.]

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Uncommon Descent Contest winner 5: Why middle-aged men have shiny scalps

Before I announce the winner, I should note that Harper One San Francisco has announced that 5 hardback copies of both Steve Meyer's Signature of the Cell, ( 2009) and Beauregard and O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain (2007 ) are available free to contest winners. Like, win and add them to your library for free.

Okay, now to Question 5:

Winner VJ Torley writes,

Go here for more.

Ontario conservative leadership race highlights intellectual freedom

Civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant writes:

I should have devoted more attention to the leadership contest for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Four candidates ran in that election -- Tim Hudak, Frank Klees, Christine Elliott and Randy Hillier. And -- amazingly -- reform of Ontario's out-of-control human rights commission became the central policy debate of the race.

Stop for a moment to reflect on how incredible that is. That simply wouldn't have happened two years ago, or perhaps even a year ago. That is a testament to the denormalization of Canada's HRCs, and how politically-aware Canadians (particularly those of a conservative stripe) have taken a keen interest in the subject.

As I noted in April, it was Randy Hillier, the great libertarian MPP, who first raised the subject, with his simple call for the abolition of Ontario's HRC. I loved his motto: real justice, real judges.

Tim Hudak saw the common sense of Hillier's position -- and its political appeal -- and dittoed Hillier's position. He had a few phraseological nuances -- he'd simply refer such matters to real courts, and get rid of the more obscene counterfeit human rights, like the "right" not to be offended. I wrote about it here.

I noticed the Toronto Star freaking out over Tim Hudak yesterday. I wrote about Hillier here


Usage notes: I use the term "intellectual freedom," not "free speech" because the latter suggests a drunk yelling profanities on a street corner. Legal, perhaps, but not important. It's the big ideas that today's censors want to suppress. Like, is gay marriage right or wrong? And, by the way, on that particular subject the censors are all alone out there. The gay people are not asking for censorship of opposing views.

Also, I use the term "civil rights" rather than "human rights." Civil rights are the rights of citizens (and landed immigrants and all lawful occupants of this country). They have a history. We can explain in detail why they are what they are. "Human rights" seem, by contrast, to be whatever a human rights commissioner makes up as she goes along.

Human evolution: From a note to a friend:

A friend had published an essay on controversies over human evolution, which prompted me to write:

One thing we might do well to keep in mind is t hat little is known about early humans - compared, say, to what we know about the Roman Empire.

As a result, the field is rife with speculation, but the speculation is often represented as fact. Changing opinion based on fragmentary information is represented as growth of knowledge in the field.

The problem is that one opinion rules out another rather than adding to a body of knowledge.

Just yesterday, I noted an article that claims that Neanderthal Man died out because homo sapiens ate them:

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said.

Izzatso? Based on the above "vast mass" of evidence?

We don't know why the 'thals went extinct, and there are usually a number of causes of an extinction.And other scientists are not exactly buying into this theory. For one thing, it isn't clear why they didn't eat us.

People read this stuff because they are interested. No harm is done if no one takes it seriously. But some do because it supports their atheistic worldview, in the same way that some Christians take End Times speculation seriously. The former, however, are more likely to receive respect from academic sources, and that matters.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: What goes around comes around

The excellent Franklin Carter of the Book and Periodical Council of Canada sends the following re intellectual freedom in Canada.
If you are an American, please care. What goes around, comes around.

The debate over whether Canada's human rights commissions and their tribunals should investigate and punish "hate speech" continues unabated.


NEWS

In the National Post, Joseph Brean reports Jennifer Lynch's and Richard Moon's latest remarks about the Canadian Human Rights Commission:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1719766


OPINION

In the Calgary Sun, Peter Worthington comments on the federal commission:

http://www.calgarysun.com/comment/columnists/peter_worthington/2009/06/21/9877986-sun.html


In the Calgary Herald, an editorial writer comments on the federal commission:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/CHRC+seeks+more+powers/1717899/story.html


In the Ottawa Citizen, Kate Heartfield comments briefly on Canada's HRCs:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/System+failures/1719492/story.html


In The Toronto Star, Haroon Siddiqui comments on the Ontario and federal conservative parties' thinking about the HRCs:

http://www.thestar.com/article/653912

Encyclopedia entries - brickbats and bouquets

A friend directs my attention to this Conservapedia entry on the intelligent design vs. unidrected evolution controversy.

It sure aims higher than this entry on me at Rationalwiki, about which a friend is pestering me to sue for defamation. But, as I keep explaining to that person, I am far more concerned about people who work for the government - on whose rage list I might well be. Why am I paying taxes for this?

Anyone who pays attention to RationalWiki presumably deserves what they get. But the government?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Cosmology: Who really cares how it washes out at the end?

At the Canadian Science Writers’ Association convention in Sudbury, Ontario, our Sunday dinner speaker was American theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who presented sample clips from famous sci-fi films. And a whole lot more.

Would you be astonished to learn that the films portray implausible or impossible physics? No? Filmmakers value audience numbers more than atomic numbers. His clips entertained, but did not surprise:

However, his talk frequently targeted religion and politics: although he professed to respect theists, he offered snarky asides suggesting that fear of science is growing in Canada (because it might damage religion), adding, "In many ways I hope it does, but it wasn't designed to do that."

Dr. Krauss also told the assembled science communicators that in many key science controversies, there is only one side and journalists confuse matters by seeking out both sides.

Not so. New discoveries in science often result from minor, not major, deviations from an expected result.

Read more here.